The Summer of My Greek Taverna: A Memoir

The story of a man in love with a place, a woman, and a dream. Tom Stone went to Greece one summer to write a novel  and stayed twenty-two years. On Patmos, he fell in love with Danielle, a beautiful French painter. His novel completed and sold, he decided to stay a little longer. Seven idyllic years later, they left Patmos for Crete. When a Patmian

Overview

The story of a man in love with a place, a woman, and a dream. Tom Stone went to Greece one summer to write a novel  and stayed twenty-two years. On Patmos, he fell in love with Danielle, a beautiful French painter. His novel completed and sold, he decided to stay a little longer. Seven idyllic years later, they left Patmos for Crete. When a Patmian friend Theológos called and offered him a summer partnership in his beach tavérna, The Beautiful Helen, Stone jumped at the chance  much to the dismay of his wife, who cautioned him not to forget the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts. Her warning was well-founded: when back on Patmos, Stone quickly discovered that he was no longer a friend or patron but a competitor. He learned hard lessons about the Greeks' skill at bargaining and business while reluctantly coming to the realization that Theológos's offer of a partnership was indeed a Trojan horse. Featuring Stone's recipes, including his own Chicken Retsina and the ultimate moussaka, The Summer of My Greek Tavérna is as much a love story as it is the grand, humorous, and sometimes bittersweet adventures of an American pursuing his dreams in a foreign land, a modern-day innocent abroad.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review His infatuation with the place (whether "fueled by an excess of retsina" or not) is infectious.

Time The summer's best travel writing...like Kitchen Confidential with ouzo.

bn.com

When Tom Stone journeyed to Greece to work on his novel, he had no idea what he was getting into. On the tiny island of Patmos, Stone would find both his future wife and an offer to run a charming beach taverna, The Beautiful Helen.

Los Angeles Times

It has been too long since our last good food-and-life books. I think of John Lanchester's "The Debt to Pleasure" or "Pass the Polenta" by Theresa Lust, not to mention the writings of M.F.K. Fisher or Elizabeth David. Now and then it is good to have these elegant reminders of slow meals and adventurous appetites.

The Summer of My Greek Taverna is also an expatriate's tale, the story of a writer and a painter and their two young children trying to live in a place that inspires them. Tom Stone adds something to his chosen genre: graphic descriptions of his own querulous doubt at each new decision. It is too easy to forget, in the Peter Mayle world, that these lives require a great deal of risk. There is never enough money, never enough security, and always one is forced to run on instinct: to trust strangers selling houses and, in Stone's case, Greeks bearing gifts. To stick to the dream.
I have come to believe that these memoirs, well and honestly written like Stone's, are extremely important; for some of us, a map of the road not taken.

Publishers Weekly

In this feast for all senses, Stone brings readers into the tiny Greek island world of Patmos in a prose that feels as languid as the pace of the Patmian people. At 33, Stone, a Broadway stage manager, puts $10,000 of an inheritance in the stock market and leaves New York for what he intends to be a five-month stay in Greece, where he would fulfill his dream of writing a novel. But five months quickly turns into love, marriage, two children and several years when he meets Danielle, a 23-year-old French painter. After moving to Rethymnon, Stone teaches English as a second language while Danielle continues to paint until an old Patmian friend, Theologos, phones and invites Stone to become his partner for the summer in his beach taverna, The Beautiful Helen. Leaping at the opportunity, Stone, and a very reluctant Danielle, pack up their two children, a Cuisinart and Stone's many recipes, and return to the island where they fell in love and where they would soon learn the hard lessons that come with Greek traditions, bargaining, the ever-present Evil Eye, and their naive trust in Theologos, known to all as O Lados, "the oily one." This nicely told memoir and travelogue is interspersed with Stone's recipes, sensual descriptions of food and place, and the love of his wife and children. (July) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Patmos, the small Greek island where St. John lived and wrote, is the setting of this brief but charming autobiographical travelog with recipes. Stone (Greece: An Illustrated History) is in love with Patmos, most of the people who live there, and especially his French-born wife, Danielle, whom he met and married there. One summer, when asked to take over a friend's restaurant at the height of the summer tourist season, Stone was able to turn his cooking avocation into a real job. In this bittersweet memoir, he recounts the reality of working from early in the morning to late at night, with almost no time for friends and family which ultimately forced him to reconsider the allure of his dream island and start thinking about how to live his life in the future. Stone also relates the seesawing friendship between himself and the taverna owner, an old friend who cheated him of thousands of dollars. Although written in the genre of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, this down-to-earth travelog certainly does not present a vacation world viewed through rose-colored glasses. Recommended for larger travel as well as cooking collections. Olga B. Wise, Compaq Computer Corp., Austin, TX Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Sometime stage manager and screenwriter Stone describes a sojourn in the eastern Aegean darkly tinged by recrimination, doubt, and regret. Perhaps it’s the author’s decision to disguise the exact location of his foray into food service on the Greek island of Patmos, as well as to change the names of pivotal characters, that brings overtones of contrivance to haunt this narrative. In his early 40s, Stone leases a taverna in partnership with the owner for a single summer of fantasy-fulfillment. He’s accompanied by his French wife Danielle, a cipher save for the attributes of sensual beauty coupled with textbook Gallic moral superiority, and their two young children. From there ensues a series of events in which a stereotypical American babe in the woods enraptured by a foreign culture bumps up against the reality of how its actual members live day to day. While Stone is eminently capable of setting the scene and telling a story, he is not a natural humorist. His shtick is to overindulge in self-deprecation while vacillating between idolatry and assassination of supposed Greek national character traits. The author maintains, for example, that if you are a guest in a Greek’s house, “he’ll give you the shirt off his back,” but that if you have done prior business with him, “it’s probably your shirt.” This less-than-subtle approach assures that readers will feel foreboding even as the lights twinkle in the summer night and customers flock in, confirming at least temporarily Stone’s theory that an amateur cook with his expertise could successfully upgrade a typical taverna’s fare. (He includes a few recipes from a menu of mostly familiar Greek dishes, with a couple of eclectic additions likechili con carne.) When the denouement arrives, replete with temptation, betrayal, guilt, and alienation, it lands like a plate of cold moussaka. Wistful, bittersweet odyssey of a bad business deal.

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from Appetizers

God's Word

The phone rang just as I was about to leave home and trudge through the raw Cretan winter to my tutoring job. The school where I worked was half a mile away, housed in a gray concrete building in the modern part of Rethymnon, along the highway just outside the old city gates. It was a private establishment, a cluster of shabby rooms on the building's second floor, where my Greek colleagues and I would spend each late afternoon and evening teaching English as a Foreign Language. Our pupils were mostly listless civil servants looking to move up the pay scale and high school students hoping for careers as guides, bank clerks, and tourist police. The pay was minimal, and the blackboards sprayed with so many layers of pale green paint that writing on them was often like trying to use chalk on the side of a cargo ship.

My wife, Danielle, answered the phone and called me in out of the rain. When I walked into the living room, she was holding the receiver in one hand and a delicate, shimmering sheet of gold leaf in the other. The gold leaf was for a Byzantine icon she was painting, one of a line of copies she hoped to sell to local tourist shops. Eight-and-a-half years before, when we met on the island of Patmos, she had been doing the same thing, a temporary measure on the way to realizing her dream of creating her own work. Now that we had two children to support, she was back at it again, just as I was learning to teach instead of working on a new novel. She had seemed able to easily accept this, shrugging it off with typical French stoicism. American that I was, I was still struggling, even at forty-two, to believe that downsizing my dreams and taking on a steady job again was a good thing.

She pressed the mouthpiece against her upper arm. "It's Theológos."

In a corner of the living room our two towheaded children  Sara, six, and Matt, going on two  were playing with the cat, sitting next to the cast-iron stove we huddled around in the afternoons and evenings while waiting for heat to drift down to us from the distant mildewed ceiling. When we had rented this apartment in the old city  four cavernous rooms on the second floor of a crumbling, marble-porticoed, seventeenth-century Venetian mansion  we thought it was a steal. Now, in our second winter in Rethymnon, we knew who had done the stealing, and that it was the landlord, not us.

"Theológos?" I asked.

"From Patmos. Livádi."

I looked at her with surprise. Although we had lived in the Patmos farming valley of Livádi winter and summer for more than seven years, buying and restoring a house there, the last people we ever expected to hear from again were its inhabitants. Even more insular than other Patmians, they referred to the people from its port, five miles away, as xéni, foreigners. They also regarded the telephone as a useful but dangerously extravagant device and rarely used it, particularly long distance.

"O Ladós?" I said, using his nickname  a necessity on Patmos, where it seemed that half the men were named either Theológos or Ioánnis (for short, "Yánnis") in honor of St. John the Theologian, Ághios Ioánnis O Theológos. It was on Patmos that John had received the visions that were set down in the Book of Revelations, in Greek, ee Apokálypsi  the Apocalypse. Theh-ós means God, and lógos word or reason; thus, theológos  theologian or God's word.

Danielle nodded.

Theológos owned a ramshackle but thriving restaurant on Livádi Beach. Not really a restaurant, but what the Greeks call a tavérna  smaller and less expensive than a regular restaurant (estiatórion) and usually family-run. When I first arrived on the island, it had been called Ee Oráya Eléni (The Beautiful Helen), but a year later, Eléni, his wife, left him, taking their daughter with her, and Theológos cut down the tree outside and changed the name to Ee Oráya Théa  The Beautiful View  which it certainly had. Sitting on the road that ran parallel to the sea, it looked through a cluster of tamarisk trees to a sand-and-pebble beach and a wide, curving bay where brightly painted fishing boats  caïques  bobbed upon the shifting, glittering waters. In the distance rose the graceful slopes of Hiliomódi, a small offshore island used by goatherders. Beyond that could be seen the shadowy shapes of other islands in the Dodecanese and, in the sharp light of winter, even the amaranthine undulations of the Turkish coast forty miles away.

Danielle handed me the phone and went back to her table, delicately applying the gold leaf to the surface of the icon she was working on. She was thirty-two and her body, even in a bulky winter sweater and after two children, was as slim as a twenty-year-old's. As she bent over the icon, her auburn hair fell across her face, and her fine French cheekbones, sloe eyes, and slightly aquiline nose were taut with concentration. The children had inherited their blond hair from the Scandinavian side of my family, but the beautiful delicacy of their features was entirely their mother's.

"Theológo!" I said into the telephone, using the Greek form of address in which the final "s" is cut off. "How are you?!"

Theológos wasn't much for small talk. An ex-merchant seaman, a capitánios, he claimed, who had meandered all over the world, he now liked to get straight to the point. Particularly long distance. So as soon as he heard my voice, he weighed anchor and set sail, hardly giving me a chance to say hello.

"Thomá!" he shouted, trumpeting the Greek version of my name all the way from Patmos. "Listen! You want to rent my tavérna this summer?"

Theológos. God's word.

The Beautiful Helen

"Thomá, are you there?" He was still on the line, waiting for me to answer, his voice crackling and faint. In bad winter weather, there was a constant possibility of being cut off, particularly when calling from one island to another. "Thomá, listen! The man from Athens  the one who rented it two years ago?  wants it again, but I thought of you. Always you told me, if you had my tavérna. Remember?"

I remembered. His offer had instantly conjured up visions of The Beautiful Helen (I was unable to imagine it with any other name), which now beguilingly arose in my mind's eye like glittering Aphrodite shining from the sea. I remembered those early summer mornings seated at a table by the beach sipping a Greek coffee, breathing in the smell of the tamarisk trees and listening to the soft slap of waves against the side of a caïque; the lazy oregano-scented lunches, after which Danielle and I would go back to our house to take a nap within the wonderful coolness of our thick-walled farmhouse and, with the children asleep, perhaps make love; and those evenings when the outside world narrowed down to the few yards illuminated by the tavérna's lights and that mad exhilaration, which the Greeks call kéfi, descended upon the gathering like a tongue of fire...

The Beautiful Helen was one of those restaurants you come across in Greece and sit in and absolutely know that you can do a better job of running than its present owner. Put some bamboo here and there, soft lighting for the evening, install better toilets, get yourself a couple of waiters who care about what they're doing, whip up some interesting recipes, and most of all, serve the food hot. The location will take care of the rest.

So, a few years before, when Theológos had begun leasing out his place for the season rather than suffer through what was becoming an increasing crush of tourists, I started saying, "You should rent it to me!"

This had been an idle request. Though I was a dedicated amateur cook and had worked in a restaurant once before, my offer was often also fueled by an excess of retsina and kéfi. Theológos himself had known this, and laughed along with me. Now, however, he was taking me seriously.

I looked at my watch. I could afford perhaps another five minutes before my trudge to the tutoring school would have to become a dash.

Out of curiosity, I asked, "How much?"

This immediately got Danielle's attention.

There was a pause before Theológos answered. "The man from Athens offered three hundred fifty thousand," he said. "For you, I can make it three hundred thousand drachmas, but no less."

About seven thousand dollars.

"Theológo, even if I wanted to, I don't have that kind of money."

Danielle stared at me.

"I thought you sold your house," said Theológos.

This caught me off guard. "Where did you hear that?"

"Eémay Patmiótis! I'm a Patmian! Everybody knows everybody else's business here. You sold your house, yes? To the Dutch doctor whose daughter wants it for her dowry?"

Amazing.

"Yes," I replied. "But," I lied, "we still haven't been paid. And we're planning to put the money away for the children. For their future. College..."

Now even the kids were listening. At least Sara was, while Matt just sat there happily trying to pull the fur off the cat's back.

"Ah! Well, then..." Theológos answered, raking in his chips.

Friends of mine who owned restaurants on the island of Mykonos had told me they made enough money in one summer to last them the entire year. And at that moment, they were probably spending the winter in Paris or New York, seeing the shows, eating at the best restaurants, while I...

"Theológo, wait. Let me think it over."

Danielle now began to look more than a little alarmed. I couldn't blame her. She knew I had a genetic predisposition, inherited from my late father, an architect and real estate developer in Washington, D.C., for formulating grandiose projects. While this tendency had brought me to Greece in the first place and had eventually gotten us our farmhouse on Patmos, she also knew that when my father died, he had been seventy thousand dollars in debt, mostly to his bookie.

"Thomá!" Theológos was shouting over the phone, "élla! Come! Everybody misses you! You're one of us  Patmiótis!"

The line went dead.

Patmiótis

One of the first things people want to know is how you do it  how you can just pull up stakes on your career (I had been a Broadway stage manager and fledgling director) and go off and live on a Greek island. The thing is, you don't really plan to. Practically all the foreigners I know who have ended up living in Greece for any extended period of time say the same thing: "I just went for a few weeks [days/hours]. But then..."

But then, something happens. Like love.

All I had wanted was to spend the summer there, four or five months at the most, and live out a long-held dream I'd cherished of going away somewhere and writing a novel. My mother had recently died of a stroke and had left me a small legacy. I put ten thousand dollars of it away in a desultory stock market, and took the rest, about two thousand, and left for Greece, where I had a painter friend, Dick Evans, also a former Broadway stage manager, who would help me get acclimated. I was thirty-three and figured I should get this out of my system before it was too late, before I married and had children  "The full catastrophe!" as Zorba says.

"I'll be back at the end of the summer," I told my friends.

*

I arrived in Greece on a bright, windswept day in March. After short stays in Athens and on the island of Mykonos, where I learned more about the hasápiko (Zorba's dance) than I did about my writing talents, I decided that if I were to get any work done at all, I would have to find some place far away from the siren calls that await you along the beaten tourist track.

I chose Patmos as the designated island by simply closing my eyes and dropping my finger on a map of the Aegean, fully confident that now that I was in Greece, I was in the hands of a benevolent Fate who would see to it that all would be well, no matter where my finger landed. "But Patmos?!" I asked. Dick hadn't heard of it either.

An old Fodor's Guide to Greece that I had found in the Athens flea market had little to say about the island. Seven miles long and three wide, it was a speck at the edge of the eastern Aegean, one of a scattering of islands along the Turkish coast known as the Dodecanese, ten hours by ship from Athens's port of Piraeus in the northwest and exactly the same from the island of Rhodes to the south. Ships rarely went there, however, because of the lack of a pier large enough for them to dock at. The guide also had some cursory information on St. John and the Book of Revelations, and a grainy black-and-white photograph of the harbor showing a few grayish-white houses and gray rocks merging into a gray sea under a cloudless gray sky. Well, I thought, I'll try it out. If it doesn't work, I can always go on to the next one.

So, at 6 A.M. on a clear morning at the beginning of May, I stumbled out onto the deck of a battered old ferryboat, the now immortal Miméka, for my first view of Patmos, completely unprepared for the revelation awaiting me. Gone were the gray skies, gray rocks, and gray sea. Instead, the rising sun was turning the high, jagged sandstone rocks of its coastline into a rich amber, and the slopes of its hills and valleys were covered with a glowing patina of green from the winter rains. In the distance, tiny caïques were making their way toward us from harbor, cutting through the sparkling blue water. Most of the passengers were looking in that direction and at the dark, brooding, crenellated mass of the Monastery of St. John on a hill to the south of the harbor, but something drew my attention to the north, where I could see a sprinkling of whitewashed farmhouses nestled in a distant emerald valley. "There!" said a little voice inside me. "You want to go there!" "There," I would later learn, was Livádi.

The dock that we disembarked on from our caïque was little more than the stone-buttressed side of a dirt road that ran along the harbor, a step above the water's edge. Skála, the name of the port town, was the same as the Greek word for "step," and this was probably the reason why it had been called simply that. In fact, the docking facilities looked as if they hadn't changed all that much since St. John first stepped off his caïque on that journey from Ephesus almost two thousand years before.

Except, that is, for the huge concrete blocks that lay jumbled at one end of the harbor. Recently, the government in Athens had decided to show Turkey how possessive it was of the Dodecanese and had begun constructing not only a new pier on Patmos but, later, an army encampment and seaside pillboxes as well.

In the harbor, a rusted dredging barge sat dormant in the water, waiting for a more seemly hour to begin its clangorous day-long operations preparing the sea bottom for the concrete blocks.

Near the middle of the harbor a bright red buoy bobbed upon the waters, about fifty yards from the western shoreline. This, I would later learn, marked the spot where a dangerously jagged rock capable of ripping open the hull of a large ship lay just beneath the surface. It was  and is  believed to be the petrified form of Yénoupas, an evil mágus turned to stone by St. John in a battle for the hearts, minds, and souls of the island's inhabitants.

This battle is not yet over  as I was reminded again and again during my stay on the island  and the story of the encounter between John and Yénoupas, a purely local legend, tells so much about Patmos that it is worth recounting here and now.

Meet the Author

Tom Stone was a Broadway stage manager and assistant director for ten years before he moved to Greece. He now lives in Santa Monica, California. Please visit the author's website at www.tomstonestaverna.com

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Summer of My Greek Taverna: A Memoir 4.6 out of 5based on
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More than 1 year ago

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Stone¿s love story of running a Greek Taverna over the course of one summer is a gem. Rarely have I read a book that has engulfed me in its essence and put me in the middle of the narrative. I particularly took to the book because reading Stone¿s words I became completely engrossed with the many similarities I myself have encountered when spending my summers in Greece. Stone¿s lush descriptions of the island of Patmos allow you to travel there instantly, him supplying you with the sights, sounds, and the smell of each moment in time. Paragraphs such as ¿There are places that seem to be waiting for you out there somewhere, like unmet lovers, and when (and if) you come upon them, you know, instantly and unquestioningly, that they are the ones. It is as if, far back in time, there had been an intimate connection to that very spot or person. So it was with Livadi. Even from as far away as the deck of the Mimeka, it had been love at first sight. I knew that there I would find not simply a house to rent but a place to belong to. Like Odysseus, I felt as if I were coming home to Ithaca after a long voyage through the troubled waters of foreign lands (including my birthplace) whose languages I had never really understood. [...] And it still amazes me to think that at that very moment, on another part of Patmos, in a little house on a cove that I had passed on the road to Livadi, the future mother of my children was sittting on her terrace pondering, as I was, what she was really going to do with her life now that she had finally gotten here.¿ Words like these are simply candy for the eyes and the heart. It allows you to be captured by the warmth, and the true essence of the author¿s passion for life. Sending chills down my spine I could picture Stone¿s arrival at that place, identifying many instances where I myself had the same feelings, be it Santorini or Egypt. Tom Stone¿s journey to Greece started out quite ¿harmless¿ as an incentive to finish a novel he¿d been writing for some time but just needed a place with the appropriate inspiration to fire off his last few chapters. Secluding himself like a monk for a month, he actually finished his novel, achieving what he came to Patmos for to do. As fate would have it, within weeks, another novel, his first, got sold. With his new-found ¿wealth¿ he thought ¿Why not stay for another month?¿ and another, and another... resulting in Tom Stone spending some 20 years in Greece. Patmos served as the stage for his life¿s play where he met his wife, and experienced his kids¿ growing up. In the 20 years, one of his most memorable experiences was running a Greek Taverna, The Beautiful Helen, for one summer, which, besides serving the traditonal Greek fare, he supplied with unique dishes he¿s concocted himself. For cooking afiocionadoes, Stone supplies you with detailed recipes of each of the dishes served at The Beautiful Helen that summer. I could sense that even though Theologos (Stone¿s restaurant partner) royally cheated Stone over, he has not lost his love for Greece. Being Greek myself, it is good to know that by way of Stone¿s writing, deep in his heart he knows that not every Greek is a Theologos. There still are Greeks who hold honor and integrity very dear. Still, Stone¿s take on the life and culture of Greeks is as close as anyone¿s ever written. The book¿s masterfully written with great wit and humor, full of adventure and comical situations, and a great way to experience Greece from home. You¿ll undoubtedly feel like you¿re at The Beautiful Helen and an integral part of the action.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

In telling this entertaining story of a young American who takes over a restaurant for the summer in the islands off the coast of Greece, Tom Stone displays a natural gift for character and storytelling that makes this delightful memoir a joy to read.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

A terrific book! I was planning on reading it on the way to Hawaii for my vacation, but started the night before and ended up finishing it the next morning. It's a great story, and I really enjoyed it. I'm sure it's going to sell very well.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Move over Paul Theroux, for here is a travel book of such graceful prose and heartfelt joy, love, and delight that it's destined to be a classic!!